I am here, at the scene of a breaking;broken bits, the metaphor of crushed paradise;forested history of burning; a trace elementversion of heritage. Ex-colliery landswhere the mines were part of the lung.

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Radstock. 1794. The Fever of August.Coleridge is crossing a boundary to his lyric field;by counter-spirit. Under his feetOld Pit is open: boys and menmine its difficult, faulted, folded vein in the dark;their candles opening limited allowance of light.Today’s halo, our luminescence: the sun.Bright flat walls; shadows in corners.Under new roads, coal is unviable;forces of earth press old roadways shut.How much carbon dioxide has breathed through?Carting boys have lived and gone.Whole lives burned their taper in winning coal.I make the metaphor: a word is a lump of coal,locked-in energy of an example.This piece is dense with experience:as it burns, it disappears.Its carbon harness, stripped off and bonded by fireto oxygen and air: two wings of dioxide’slight and buoyant paraphernalia.This is combustion; earth to the exosphere.

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Driving to Radstock from the north (Norwegian diesel)you see the coalfields of Somerset.Each year, time is a little shorter.Coal still powers the electrical grid in part.From minerals below, the Tropic of Cancer was landed;Carboniferous club moss, horsetail’s waterlogged equatorial.I put a light to dry tinder under the smudge of coaland the peacock glint of its variants; solid, dark and old.We will disappear; we will nuance, contribute, divulgethis agent into airs. I think we will disappear.But where the fire happens, today and active;closer, get closer.Seas rise, glaciers melt, winds stricken.It could be a voice, a skew in the song of billions;coal’s articulate agency, the deformed, aerated lacesmouldering. A widow’s veil.

An action of striking, a tautology of flame:I put the image of coal into metaphor;smudging my fingers. Watch how it burns.Watch how it flares, extrudes, goes grey.Coal’s wild, iconic body.Smoke deviates air to exist as fumes.The tick of cinders, compounding fathoms.Coal fuelled Portishead Power Station until 1973;how did it burn fast enough? A chandelier is still electric.At the wires’ ends coal is the landscape too hot to walk;and it must be bituminous, it must be tarry,forest trinkets fuming to the sun.